Rose argues that the existence of the worship of a mother goddess must not be taken as evidence of matrilinear succession, and were this the only detail on which we could rely, I would readily admit that the evidence was too slight. But we have some support from pedigrees. Rose dismisses the evidence from traditional genealogies, because “many of these are late, and a large part of them is doubtless pure invention.”[530] I do not feel confident that we must dismiss these genealogies, even if late, so summarily. Much of the detail contained in them occurs in the tragedians, who gathered it from the legendary matter current in their day. That there was much more such legendary matter, and that it was for long after kept alive in the minds of the people, is clear from the pages of Pausanias. Still doubtless there were some inventions, in fact it is obvious from internal evidence that this was so, but such interpolations can usually be detected, and by no means vitiate the pedigrees for our purpose. Often the interpolation is but the substitution of a fictitious name for an unnamed son or daughter, or when tradition states that C is the grandson of A, a name B has been invented to fill in the missing intermediate ancestor. I propose, therefore, to examine some of these pedigrees, and will choose those of undoubted Minoan origin. Ridgeway[531] has suggested that the Minoans traced their descent from Poseidon, as the “Achæans” did from Zeus or Ares. There are three well-known families that do so, the Neleids of Pylos, the Danaans of the Argolid and the Cadmeians of Bœotia; in the two former cases there is ample evidence that those places received a population from Crete either in the first or early in the second Late Minoan period. The Neleid pedigree is meagre and does not help us, but those of the Danaans and Cadmeians are fuller, and it is claimed by later writers that the families were connected. The first part of the genealogy is unquestionably fictitious, and designed to show a connection between the two families, but it is worth looking at. /Poseidon/=_Libya_. | __________________________|____________ | | Belus=_Anchinoe_. Agenor | =_Telephassa_. _______|_____ _____________|_______________ | | | | | | Danaus= Ægyptus= Cadmus Phœnix Cilix _Europa_ | | =_Harmonia_ =/Zeus/. __|_______ |______________ | | | | | ________________________| 49 daus. | | | | | | | | | Minos. Rhadamanthus. Sarpedon. _Hypermnestra_--Lynceus 49 sons.